Hellblade Dev Diary: Creating the World

Hello, Dominic Matthews here from Ninja Theory. I wanted to come back to PlayStation.Blog to share our latest development diary with you and to also give an update on how things are progressing with the creation of our new PS4 title Hellblade.

Back in August we announced Hellblade at PlayStation’s Gamescom Press Conference, which at the time was just 4 months into development. By traditional standards, we were announcing the game incredibly early in development. The reason for such an early announcement is that we want to share as much of Hellblade’s development with you as we possibly can.

The standard approach is for games and their development to be hidden away, with details slowly drip fed to players very carefully and slowly over time. But we want to do the opposite. We announced early so that we could start sharing our development approach, creative exploration and decision making from the very beginning. Since Gamescom we’ve been updating our site with regular development diary videos, blog posts, concept art and live streams. We’ve released three development diaries to date, focused on the announcement trailer, Hellblade’s art inspiration and the game’s protagonist, Senua, respectively.

Today, I’m very pleased to be sharing with you our very latest development diary, No. 4: Creating the World. This episode focuses on the approach that we’re taking to create Hellblade’s world with just one Environment Artist and the artistic vision behind it.

The Hellblade team, which consists of 13 people, is currently embarking on the prototyping phase of development. In prototyping we’ll be exploring game mechanics, art styles, and technologies. Despite the small team, this is probably our most ambitious game yet. We are leaping into the unknown and overturning much of what we know about game making to make Hellblade play, look and feel special.

Thanks a lot for reading, I hope to come back soon, but in the meantime I hope you follow our journey, get involved in the discussions and let us know what you think of our work so far. The journey is very much a part of the Hellblade experience.